Friday, February 16, 2007

Every now and then I take a look at the Apple discussion boards to see if there are any major problems affecting Apple users. I concluded long ago that the most common problem for these things, particularly laptops is overheating. For some reason, even though there are all sorts of failsafe mechanisms both hardware and software to deal with an overheating processor, nonetheless, what often seems to happen is the processor itself, after screaming for help in various ways, does all it can do in the realm of self preservation and just stops.

One can only assume after all the hand waving and shrugs from people who claim to work for Apple that much of this is totally beyond their control, it ain't your friendly Apple COMPUTER company any more you know.

But this visit to the Apple discussion forum took me to a post for someone who WANTS his computer to just suddenly stop. Apparently this guy has never used a computer of any kind before and expects to just turn the thing off like a TV set. Well, that WOULD be nice wouldn't it, but the notion of a purely "appliance" PC has never had enough traction for a successful implementation, even though some have tried.

More surprising, Apple employees missing in action on this discussion forum. Sometimes they seem to monitor the thing and sometimes they don't, although they seem to monitor quite carefully for disparaging remarks about Apple, while ignoring actual customer problems. But in this case, even other helpful Apple users seem to be ignoring this quite easy to answer question. Either that, of Apple users have become more computer illiterate than ever. Has the forum become so useless that the guru users have stopped visiting it?

I'm still quite sure that in spite of strong laptop sales, all the DOA and seriously messed up systems that Apple is shipping will cost them mind share sooner or later. I think laptops sales are strong for everyone making computers as more people switch to laptops from desktops, and with much higher margins on laptops this is good for everyone's bottom line. Yes, quite a few more people are buying Apple computers to run Windows, but this is will be a short lived phenomena if many of those people have bad experiences compared with earlier experiences with Dell and Compaq etc.

Anyway, I wrote and explanation for why computers don't shut down instantly. An Apple person should have been on staff to do something as simple as that... heck you could almost automate the process. Maybe one day soon there will be computers that can be just shut off, by under-the-covers elimination of the distinction between shut-down and sleep modes for example, but that's another story.

1 comment:

I think apple users are a different breed of computer user. Many never shut their machines off, choosing instead to put their laptops to sleep for months on end. I look after my macbook and switch it off every day. So far so good. No problems.